for such a sacred purpose, is not a man, and has no right to wear the form. He should be sent back to nature's mint, and re-issued as a counterfeit on humanity of nature's baser metal. Oh! it is terrible, that in this beautiful world, which the good God has given us, and in which there is plenty for us all, men should die of starvation! In these days, when improvements in agriculture and the mechanical arts have quadrupled the productiveness of labor; when it is manifest that the earth produces every year more than sufficient to clothe and feed all her thronging millions; it is a shame and a disgrace, that the word starvation has not long since become obsolete, or only retained to explain the dim legends of a barbarous age. You who have never been beyond the precincts of our own favored country; you, more especially, who have always lived in this great valley of the Mississippi-the cornucopia of the worldwho see each day poured into the lap of your city, food sufficient to assuage the hunger of a nation, can form but an imperfect idea of the horrors of famine, of the terror which strikes men's souls when they cry in vain for bread. When a man dies of disease, he alone endures the pain. Around his pillow are gathered sympathizing friends, who, if they cannot keep back the deadly messenger, cover his face and conceal the horrors of his visage, as he delivers his stern mandate. In battle, in the fullness of his pride and strength, little recks the soldier whether the hissing bullet sing his sudden requiem, or the cords of life are severed by the sharp steel. But he who dies of hunger wrestles alone, day after day, with his grim and unrelenting enemy. He has no friends to cheer him in the terrible conflict; for if he had friends, how could he die of hunger? He has not the hot blood of the soldier to maintain him; for his foe, vampire-like, has exhausted his veins. Famine comes not up like a brave enemy, storming by a sudden onset, the fortress that resists. Famine besieges. He draws his lines around the doomed garrison; he cuts off all supplies; he never summons to surrender, for he gives no quarter. Alas! for poor human nature, how can it sustain this fearful warfare? Day by day the blood recedes; the flesh deserts; the muscles relax, and the sinews grow powerless. At last the mind, which at first had bravely nerved itself for the contest, gives way under the mysterious influences that govern its union with the body. Then he begins to doubt the existence of an overruling Providence; he hates his fellow men, and glares upon them with the longings of a cannibal, and, it may be, dies blaspheming! Who will hesitate to give his mite to avert such awful results? Surely not you, citizens of New Orleans, ever famed for your deeds of benevolence and charity. Freely have your hearts and your purses opened, heretofore, to the call of suffering humanity. Nobly did you respond to oppressed Greece and struggling Poland. Within Erin's borders is an enemy more cruel than the Turk; more tyrannical than the Russian. Bread is the only weapon that can conquer him. Let us, then, load ships with this glorious munition, and, in the name of our common humanity, wage war against this despot Famine. Let us, in God's name, "cast our bread upon the waters," and if we are selfish enough to desire it, we may recollect the promise, that it shall be returned to us after many days. If benevolence be not a sufficient incentive to action, we should be generous from common decency; for out of this famine we are adding millions to our fortunes. Every article of food, of which we have a superabundance, has been doubled in value, by the very distress we are now called upon to alleviate. We cannot do less, in common honesty, than to divide among the starving poor of Ireland a portion of the gains we are making out of their misfortunes. Give, then, generously and freely. Recollect that, in so doing, you are exercising one of the most god-like qualities of your nature, and, at the same time, enjoying one of the greatest luxuries of life. We ought to thank our Maker that He has permitted us to exercise, equally with Himself, that noblest of even the Divine attributes, benevolence. Go home and look at your family, smiling in rosy health, and then think of the pale, famine-pinched cheeks of the poor children of Ireland; and I know you will give according to your store, even as a bountiful Providence has given to you-not grudgingly, but with an open hand; for the quality of benevolence, like that of mercy, Is not strained, It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven, MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON [1820-1897] ELIZABETH PRESTON ALLAN MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON did not claim to be a poet. Her standard of what a true poet should measure up to was so high that she repudiated, almost indignantly, that claim as made in her behalf by the lovers and admirers of her writings. She called herself "a singer with a slender trill," and declared that there were those for whom the lark and nightingale soared with a song too distant, who yet listened with pleasure to her "quiet cooings in the leafy dark"; for them, she said, she sang; but let no one think she aspired to be called lark or nightingale. Nevertheless, the claim was made for her during her lifetime, and steadily persists, now that her voice has been hushed by the Great Silence, that she was a true poet, and one of no mean rank. There is, indeed, much of her verse which fits her own modest description of her writings; and, were she judged by this "quiet cooing," the name "poet" might be found too large for her; but she could leave these level fields, when she so willed, and rise to heights of imagination, passion, and poetic feeling; nor did she lack the words that "breathe and burn" in which to give utterance to her inspiration. Her friends sometimes complained that she wasted the sacred fire; they would have had her save herself for rarer and loftier efforts, rather than put forth the melodious and continued stream of verse which delighted her readers. But Mrs. Preston deliberately made her choice; she put aside the ambition which in her youth had filled her heart; she was not writing for "posterity"; she used laughingly to declare that she cared nothing for posterity; but the impulse was strong within her to speak some word of comfort, cheer, or hope to her own generation. She was, first of all, after her marriage, a wife, and undoubtedly her husband's approval and appreciation gave the primary impetus to her work; there was also a deep and serious sense of responsibility for the talent committed to her; she was absolutely without vanity or conceit concerning her poetic gift; no poet ever had less of the Wordsworthian self-appreciation than Mrs. Preston; but she recognized the fact that a gift of song had been entrusted to her by her Creator, and all her days were filled with the deep and earnest pur pose to consecrate it to His glory and to the uplift and comfort of her fellow men. Did she accomplish this high endeavor? Whatever place it may be hers to keep in Fame's memorial hall, without doubt she reached and influenced a large circle of readers in her own day; this is proved by the praise and affection lavished upon her during her lifetime, not only by those who came into the circle of her acquaintance, but by hundreds of readers who never saw her face, and who reached her only through the mail, or by public tributes. We may say, then, of this poet, that even if her verse passes out of sight like the bright leaves of autumn that fall into some swift stream, she did not live and work in vain; she accomplished her life purpose. But it has been found since her death that there is a quality in her poetry which the present-day reader would not willingly let die; and our volume seeks to set forth and illustrate this by giving selections of her varying styles. Our poet's life was happily an uneventful one, not furnishing any dramatic incidents to narrate. Except for the tragedy of war, which thrust itself into her peaceful existence from 1861 to 1865, Mrs. Preston's was the common lot of her kind; she was born, she developed into maturity; she loved and married; she bore children; she descended life's slope into the infirmities of old age; she died, after overpassing by several years "the birthday of the limitation," three-score years and ten. But if there are those among the latter-day readers of Mrs. Preston's poetry who press for a more intimate acquaintance, and who wish to know, not only what she has revealed of her deepest self in her writings, but also how she appeared to those about her, how she went in and out among us, along the level stretches of life, when she was not climbing poetic heights-such inquirers may be interested in the brief and simple annals of her life. Margaret Junkin was born on the nineteenth of May, 1820, in Milton, Pennsylvania, where her father, the Rev. George Junkin, was serving the village Presbyterian church. She was the eldest of a family of eight sons and daughters, born to Dr. Junkin and his wife during his career as preacher and teacher in Milton, Germantown, Miami (Ohio), and Easton; and Margaret's position as the eldest child, where the family circle was large and the income small, brought many limitations, self-denials, and even hardships into her early life. For, although Mrs. Junkin, who was Julia Rush Miller of Philadelphia, had brought her husband what was then counted a comfortable fortune, she seemed to sympathize fully with Dr. Junkin's desire to spend that fortune on others, which he did, educating enough young men for the ministry to have formed a whole synod, while he brought up his family in the plainest and most economical way possible. What a splendid education this must have been to the children of that manse, this intense and absorbing purpose to live for others, which was the atmosphere of their home! What were Greek and Latin and French and history compared to this school of life, in which the father and no less the high-souled, unselfish mother were the lesson-books? And yet Margaret's education did not suffer; from the time that she stood at her father's knee, a tiny six-year-old tot, learning the Greek alphabet, until her twenty-first year, when a temporary, partial blindness "slammed the door of knowledge in her face," the father's relentless ambition was matched by her own, to make her a great scholar. A great scholar she never became, for at twenty-one years of age her eyes failed, and she spent most of the next seven years in a darkened room. But the intense application of those earlier years was followed by a lifetime of thirst for knowledge, particularly knowledge of what we call in a wide sense "literature"; and few women of her time came into a richer mental culture, or gathered a more profitable store of knowledge from classic as well as from modern fields. Her marriage with Colonel J. T. L. Preston did much to foster this liberal education. Colonel Preston spent his life as professor of Latin and belles-lettres at the Virginia Military Institute, and was a man of wide culture, a writer, a lecturer, and a fine critic. In many respects he became her teacher and guide, walking certain paths of literature with a firmer tread than her own; and, as has been said, his never-failing interest and delight in her poetry were throughout life her strongest incentives. No record is found of how early her verses began to appear in newspapers and magazines, though there is evidence that it was in her earliest 'teens. But it was not until a year before her marriage that she published anything in book form. This first volume was 'Silverwood, a Book of Memories.' It was a story of life in old Virginia, and was written in a pleasant, fluent style, but had no dramatic force. Mrs. Preston had no gift as a story-writer; the tools of her craft were not fitted for such architecture, and she was always ready to acknowledge that 'Silverwood' had no special merit as a novel. During the ever darkening days of the winter of 1864-'65, Mrs. Preston wrote 'Beechenbrook-A Rhyme of the War,' and sent it |